Imperial Hay Haulers

Hauling hay across California's baking Imperial Valley

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

Tourists gawking at the Hollywood Walk of Fame or Fishermen's Wharf never see this California--which isn't to suggest they don't depend on it. Running east of San Diego toward the Salton Sea, where California and the Sonora desert of Mexico coexist, is the unbelievably rich farm belt called the Imperial Valley. Everybody knows that fruits and vegetables leap out of California's irrigated soil, but there's also another key crop in these parts, alfalfa. The hay baled from cut alfalfa feeds dairy cattle, making milk California's biggest farm product, another fact that's not widely disseminated.

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Steve Wickens gets it, though--just like his father, Jim, knew what was going on. A San Diego native, Jim Wickens learned it by muscling any number of heavy rigs over the mountains into the Imperial Valley during the 1950s, in searing heat that approached 100 degrees in summertime, working the gears and brakes of his flatbed and pull-along full trailer stacked high with greenish alfalfa hay. Steve tells us it was physically punishing but great, steady work for a guy who liked to drive.
"All the dairies were pretty much over in the San Diego area, or in the Central Valley. My dad focused his work by heading from San Diego over into the Imperial Valley and loading hay, all the way from the Arizona line and sometimes into Arizona itself," he recalls. "Then he'd bring it back, all on these two-lane roads with these underpowered trucks. When I first started riding with him--I was maybe two or three years old--he had an old KH International with a gasoline engine. I remember the windshield cranked out for a little ventilation."
Originally, the Imperial Valley was a baked desert. That was until the All-American Canal, an offshoot of the Boulder Dam project, brought Colorado River water to the region, beginning in the 1930s. The desert exploded in greenery. Since then, winter crops such as lettuce have become major industries, and alfalfa is grown year-round. On the trucks, we can see bales largely comprised of alfalfa, sometimes with a little natural grass thrown in, adjusting its protein levels to dairymen's specifications.
Getting into the valley from San Diego took truckers from sea level to 3,000 feet with a lot of other undulations, even on the valley floor. The hay loading involved a process called "roadsiding." Drivers weighed the truck empty, and then headed out with a map, sometimes hand-drawn, that showed a route where alfalfa farmers would have bales lined up along the road, ready for pickup. Often, the bales were marked by a card, 12 by 18 inches or so, with the farmer's name on it. A loader driving a pickup would follow the flatbed. The trucker would haul the hay back into the San Diego area, where the truck would be weighed again, its gross weight determining the load's value.
While San Diego was very much a Navy town, as well as a booming aerospace hub, it was also a haven of family-run dairies, many of them run by Dutch families that had migrated to the area. "I can remember going to a dairy in San Diego County with my dad, and the guy who ran the store wore wooden shoes with no socks. That's no lie," Steve says.
This image, from Steve's collection, illustrates heavy hay rigs lined up at an offloading site in El Cajon, California. The big cabover trucks are International Harvester units built at the company's West Coast factory in Emeryville, California, and run by Imperial Hay Haulers. The probable mid-1950s timeframe, use of an integral sleeper cab, and the cab's height indicate that they're International LFCD-405s, the "F" designating a flat cab floor due to the engine (originally, a 165hp Cummins HRB-600 diesel with six cylinders and 672 cubic inches, although larger 200 and 220hp Cummins diesels were also commonplace) being completely under the cabs. To get over the mountains, the drivers slammed a variety of Fuller and Spicer main and/or auxiliary transmissions. As a historical aside, International built a big order of over-the-road RDC-405 tractors for Pacific Intermountain Express, which replaced P-I-E's famous early Peterbilts and a shorter JT-6-B Cummins for easier compliance with state-by-state length laws. The Imperial rigs pull 24-foot, two-axle trailers.
Now, look more closely. You'll notice that the Internationals' diesel exhaust stacks have been relocated from the normal position behind the cab to a new spot, exiting from beneath the engine, ahead of the windshield, to move it away from its crackling-dry vegetative cargo. They're topped by spark arrestors that could have been lifted from the log-burning locomotives at Promontory Point. The other trucks are more conventional GMC two-stroke diesels with conventional cabs. The gentleman admiring the trucks, incidentally, is Steve's Uncle John, who also drove and loaded hay trucks. As to the GMCs, their stacks appear to be wrapped with insulation material.
"With a non-turbocharged engine, the manifolds would get cherry red, so they tried to keep the sparks out of the hay," says Steve, a second-generation trucker who lives near Fort Smith, Arkansas. "They will throw a flame. At night, when you had the fuel coming to them and you were really pulling, you could see a little bit of flame coming out of the end of the stack. Every once in a while, a spark would get in there and set a load on fire."

This article originally appeared in the October, 2011 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.